It’s a supreme joy
to watch two of the the great 70s tough guys, Robert Conrad and Don
Stroud, pound each other into bloodied mince in a Manila meat works
in Eddie Romero’s bleak, black and breathtakingly suave B pic. An
international sugar company’s left-leaning President (Ken Metcalfe)
watches helplessly as he is shot and his family massacred in the
film’s distinctly unsettling opening, and tries to enlist the help
of retired CIA man and now beach bum “Duke” Smith (Conrad) before
his car in blown to smithereens. The firm’s go-to man (John Ashley)
sets up the local anti-corporate activist Brownhats (led by Fernando
Poe Jr’s half-brother Conrad) to take the fall, but Duke and his
former CIA cohort Wyatt (Blaxploitation regular Felton Perry) decide
to take on the company in an all-out war. The two-thirds mark signals
Stroud’s entrance as Dominic Elba, a dandy top-dollar assassin and
Duke’s respected adversary, and the film subsequently hurtles from
one bloodied squib to endless shotgun blasts and its ultimately dour
ending with a ferociously assured hand. Romero’s gallows humour
from Savage Sisters (1974) is on display (see the brothel scene where
a judge is caught with a sheep!) within his characteristically
literate and imaginative camera frame; the leads are uniformly
excellent, as is Eddie Garcia (also “Associate Director”) as the
company’s local Machiavellian representative, Thayer David as the
slimy Teutonic chairman and child molester, and the late great Vic
Diaz as an uncredited carnival barker. Also missing from the credits
is Monte Hellman, Romero’s associate on Flight To Fury (1963), as
co-editor.

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HERR LEAVOLD

Andrew Leavold owned and managed Trash Video, the largest cult video rental store in Australia, from 1995 to 2010. He is also a film-maker, published author, researcher, film festival curator, musician, and above all, unrepentant and voracious fan of the pulpier aspects of genre cinema. His writing has been published globally in mainstream magazines, academic journals and underground cinema fanzines, for the last two decades.

Leavold toured the world with his feature length documentary The Search For Weng Weng (2013). His ten years of research on genre filmmaking in the Philippines formed the basis of Mark Hartley's documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed! (released internationally in 2010), on which Leavold is also Associate Producer, and he has since been recognized both in the Philippines and abroad as the foremost authority in his area of expertise, teaching Philippine film history at university level in Australia, the United States, and throughout the Philippines. Leavold teamed with Daniel Palisa to co-direct The Last Pinoy Action King (2015), both a feature-length documentary on the late Filipino action idol Rudy Fernandez, and a dissection of film royalty, politics, privilege, idolatry, and the Philippines’ pyramid of power.

He is currently shooting two new feature-length documentaries – The Most Beautiful Creatures On The Skin Of The Earth (also with Palisa), the third in his Filipino trilogy, about erotic cinema under Marcos; and Pub, a history of the vibrant St Kilda music scene as told through its most outrageous progeny, Fred Negro. Both films are due for release in 2018.